Could a robot have written this story ? The rise of the Robo-journalist

They don’t call journalists ’hacks’ for nothing.

At large news agencies where speed is crucial, template-style stories have long been used for company results, allowing journalists to simply key in the relevant facts and numbers and fire off the dispatch.

Often disparagingly referred to as ’churnalism,’ some of the larger media organisations — including the L.A. Times and Associated Press — have now turned to robots to take the grind out of formulaic dispatches.

The L.A. Times uses the algorithms in its in-house software — called Quakebot - to produce reports on local earthquakes, using data provided by the US Geological Survey.